"Let’s do lunch,” Hillary Clinton e-mailed me on Tuesday, September 4, at 11:18 a.m. For a narcissistic moment, I thought maybe she actually wanted to get together and was using a circa-1989 coinage (one that had slipped well past ironic-referential mode by 1994, roughly to where “That’s how I roll” is today) as some kind of inside joke. We had, after all, met for about 30 seconds at a company-sponsored fund-raiser not long before, where my co-workers and I had been asked to wait in a long line in order to have a quick interchange with the candidate and then a grip-and-grin. We had snobbishly refused to get in line but then thought, Why not? Maybe we can say one day that we met her. It was …
brief. “Let’s talk, you and me—about whatever you’d like,” her e-mail went on, as if she were continuing our conversation. “Our hopes. Our goals. Our work. The weather. Maybe even politics.” Then the clincher: “I think it would be fun to have you over for lunch, at my table, in my home in Washington.”

Moi?

On Thursday, September 6, at 11:19 a.m., Bill Clinton sent me a follow-up note. Apparently his wife had filled him in on the impending festivities. “Dear Michael,” he wrote, “I hear you might be having lunch with Hillary—do you mind if I drop in?” Wha-hey! This was turning out to be quite a party.

Turned out that might was the operative word. Only one supporter would be invited, along with a friend, and you had to donate to her campaign by midnight Friday to qualify. I declined. But Bill and I were getting quite chummy. On September 25, at 11:20 a.m., Bill got in touch again: “You, me, a TV, and a bowl of chips.” The intimacy was making me sweat slightly. “There are two things in this world that I love more than anything else,” he confided, “my family and politics. So you can imagine just how fired up I get when Hillary is on the stage debating the issues that matter to our country.” I know, it’s almost sexual. Bill was passing along the good news that three lucky Hillary supporters would be invited, each with a guest, to watch an upcoming debate. “We’ll sit down in front of a big TV with a big bowl of chips, watch the debate, and talk about the race.”

I didn’t want to offend Bill, but what with his recent heart problems, maybe “a big bowl of chips” was not exactly what the doctor ordered. Hillary shared my concern, bless her heart, even in the middle of a heated primary campaign. Two days later, September 27, at 10:48 a.m., she couldn’t contain herself any longer. “Dear Michael,” she wrote, urgency clearly visible between the lines. “I hear you might be watching a debate with Bill.” Indeed, I might be. “Can I ask you a favor? Bill mentioned ‘a big bowl of chips’ in the email he sent you Tuesday. If you are one of the three people who get the chance to join him, can you make sure he eats carrots, not chips?”

It turns out that Glenda, Clare, and David were the three lucky winners of the “bowl of chips” offer from Bill, as he helpfully informed me on November 6, at 2:16 p.m., in an e-mail titled “Glenda, Clare, and David” (Bill must’ve slept in—these e-mails were coming later now). He even sent along a link to a video of him and Glenda, Clare, and David watching Hillary debate. The video showed that there was more than just chips and carrots on offer, lovingly panning over peppers, pretzel sticks, and other evidence of a well-appointed spread. “Pizza!” Bill exclaimed as he walked in. And I was able to learn that Bill subsequently ate both chips (with dip!) and carrots as he watched his wife on the flat-screen TV. According to everyone in attendance, she did a great job. Bill helpfully pointed out to Glenda, Clare, and David how she countered but did not attack, and effused that the country was really looking for solutions, not empty rhetoric. After the debate, Hillary called in, and Bill put David on the phone. Since we all know that she worries, he made sure to tell her that he had gotten Bill to eat some carrots after all.

Watch Bill Clinton enjoying refreshments with Glenda, Clare, and David

From the archives:

"Inside the Clinton Shake-Up" (February 2008)
How Hillary's campaign managed itself into a ditch—and how it might get itself out. By Joshua Green

Really, who comes up with this nonsense? Sure, we all know that this is the “YouTube election.” The Web has replaced TV, and e-mail has replaced direct mail, as the current modes of wholesale campaigning. Hillary’s tone-deafness has been well explored and mocked, but her comprehensive misapprehension of how rapidly mutating media alter the way people communicate has not. The digital living room she was once going to fill with listening and sharing as she cakewalked to the nomination has become an altogether more dissonant gathering place. Thanks to some sort of undead-like invincibility, she is surviving, but certainly not to have the sort of chummy conversation she envisioned in those innocent fall e-mails. Like watching Nixon sweat on television in 1960, to read Hillary’s e-mail today is to experience an old dispensation crashing headlong into the new. Clearly, someone at Hillary HQ—or, more likely, a highly paid consultant—spent serious time building a multiplatform, interactive strategy to swathe the electorate in the marital faux-togetherness of Bill and Hillary running for office. Someone thought, Hey, let’s really connect with the public and let them in on what it’s truly like to be a candidate for president in 2008, dangle in front of them like a big pepperoni pizza the prospect of intimacy with a past and possibly future world leader.

There’s a serious point here. For all the focus on position papers, and process, and even likability, what gets lost is that elections are ultimately about making connections; about showing the largest number of voters that you care about them; about, as they say in my world, relatability. Relatability is a function of discourse, which requires the candidate to speak in the vernacular of the moment. And what the era of YouTube and social media prizes is authenticity, improvisation, rough edges. Whether these values are genuinely held or brilliantly mimicked is immaterial. You have to bring the realness.

John McCain and Barack Obama turn out to be fantastic at realness; each offers up a kind of linguistic meta­narrative that says—screams—“I am not a politician,” or at least, “I’m not only a politician.” Obama’s admission in his 1995 autobiography that he did “a little blow” as a teenager may in retrospect have been his most brilliant campaign gambit, one that makes him of this moment (confessional, flawed, post-Boomer, ultimately untouchable on questions of honesty because he already admitted to something no candidate has ever admitted to before) the way Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale” nonadmission (Boomerish, entitled, prone to sanctimonious deployments of situational ethics) made him quintessentially of his. Authenticity now is more coded, in the sense that the politician needs to have an intuitive understanding of how to converse, what to concede, what to hide, and what the Web hive will and will not validate.

As we contemplate Hillary’s persistent outré-ness, it’s worth dwelling on the ways in which she so misunderstood this moment. She is a politician who can never get out of the way of her politicianness; even her efforts to recast her campaign as a “conversation” reeked of politician. Last summer, the Clintons’ YouTube quasi-parody of the Sopranos finale initially seemed audacious, a witty surfacing of the repressed subtext of the couple’s Mob-dynastic ambitions and less-than-fully-intact marital status, until it devolved to more shtick about Bill’s diet. Perhaps the Clintons didn’t get their own joke? The campaign proceeded to become more and more obtuse about the Bill-Hillary dynamic until the subtext—was Bill undermining his wife’s candidacy?—drowned out the official text. Despite those grasping and un-fun appearances on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (required stops on the political self-flagellation circuit), it remains hard to find the human being inside, to break through Hillary’s carefully wrought positional scrim.

Watch the Clintons's Sopranos parody

The word conversation implies at least some form of interactivity. But as Frank Rich has pointed out repeatedly and hilariously, Hillary’s spontaneous interactions with the public have all the improvisational élan of a Fortune 500 earnings call. On her Web chats, the viewer questions might as well be submitted by voter­bots. Hillary answers in fully formed paragraphs that double as nonnarcotic sedatives.

The numbing perfection of Hillary’s self-ideation makes you hate her even when you like her. Who can read the teaser for another YouTube video without throwing up a little inside his mouth?: “She’ll never stop fighting for those who fight for us, and give voice to those who have none.” Never? Even when she’s busy giving Americans the health-care choices they deserve and need?

We understand intuitively why this discourse comes off as so wooden, so content-less, even in its relentless gravitas, but why is it so off-putting now? The answer has to do with how digital culture has made us all skeptics, all Swift Boaters. There is not one affectation, one biographical detail, that now can survive the relentless interrogation of bloggers, oppo researchers, amateur videographers, data miners. This digital Panopticon has in turn bred a culture of preemptive self-revelation, a race to bare body and essence: Hey, I did a little blow!

From the archives:

"The Peril of Obama" (April 2008)
The glamour of Obama may be hard to resist, but could it get the country into trouble if he wins the presidency? By Virginia Postrel

Obama’s weaknesses may lie in the realm of substance and experience, but his self-revelatory style has so far served to obfuscate these potential problems. Paradoxically for a generational totem, his speeches are overtly retro, harking back to FDR and Reagan. But in interviews, he speaks in English, as an actual smart person might in normal conversation. Can you imagine Hillary saying anything as introspective, sophisticated about racial identity, and in its own way daring, as what Barack recently told Vanity Fair? “You know,” he said, referring to his high-school basketball career in Hawaii, “I had an overtly black game, behind-the-back passes, and wasn’t particularly concerned about fundamentals, whereas our coach was this Bobby Knight guy, and he was all about fundamentals—you know, bounce passes, and four passes before you shoot, and that sort of thing.” That such a comment, which 15 years ago might have caused real controversy, went without notice is evidence of how Obama’s seeming artlessness has at least temporarily reconfigured the traditional gotcha relationship between candidate and press. There’s nothing to reveal when the candidate ingeniously seems to be revealing everything. His Web site, like McCain’s, is noticeably free of feigned closeness. Meanwhile, McCain’s temper, his erratic qualities, his politically incorrect jokes (even that lame Beach Boys “Bomb Iran” crack), his forthright, often combative speeches, suddenly make him more authentic, more now, more Greatest Generation 2.0. McCain understood this new culture of authenticity intuitively even during the 2000 election, when he branded his campaign the “Straight Talk Express.” In this endlessly mediated age, even authenticity is a form of branding. Indeed, precisely because we live in an era of endlessly manipulable images, authenticity is the most truly prized brand attribute. But McCain, 100 percent authentic or not, has compellingly sold realness, and may do so all the way to the White House.

This is why an Obama-McCain match-up would be the most engrossing in recent memory: not only an opportunity to see two master communicators go at each other but a chance to alter political discourse for good. The old political speech has started sounding so canned that we literally cannot hear it. I could listen to Hillary all day without really understanding a word she says. It’s not just the unearned intimacy; it’s the way everything seems manipulated and focus-tested by teams of professionals to the point where it becomes a kind of elision, a non-speak.

In early March, Obama sent me an e-mail. It presumed no intimacy. It was titled “Will you make a call for me?” And it asked me to call six people, and, if needed, employ a script that I could access on his Web site. The theme of the e-mail was “connection,” and the idea behind it was that voters would be swayed more by hearing from their fellow voters than from the candidate directly. “The most extraordinary things happen at the personal level, when you can make that personal connection to a voter and discover that you share a common vision of what ought to be,” the e-mail read. “Make a call and make that connection today.” In its frank way, the strategy recalled the chain letters we received as kids, but it also got to the heart of what a digital-era campaign could be: honest about its agenda, distributed, connected. A conversation, even.

About the Author

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.